Welcome back to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution podcast with your host Andrew Smith broadcasting once again from the ancient city of Xi'an.

It's a lovely chilly last week of January and preparations for Spring Festival or Chinese New Year are in full swing as we gather together to prepare to welcome the year of the dragon.

You know, I have a good feeling about this year as traditionally the year of the dragon is always an auspicious year with lots and lots of good luck. So, here's to hoping.

As for life updates, the first week of February should be fun. Youkun and I are headed to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, which has a beautiful view of the Yellow River and was the scene of a lot of interesting Chinese People's War of Liberation, Anti-Japanese Resistance War, and Cultural Revolution events despite being designated in Chinese society as being a bit of a backwater town and you know, Gansu province still is today an extremely underdeveloped province.

Uh, you know, I've never fully visited there, but on my way to Xinjiang, I went by train through the entirety of Gansu and let me tell you, it's pretty back run down and it's the boonies. It's a lot like uh West Virginia.

Um and but as such, it's one of the main targets of the poverty alleviation campaigns that the Chinese government's doing right now.

Um as for Chinese New Year / Spring Festival itself, it will be the second week of February this year.

Um we're actually staying in Xi'an this year for the Spring Festival itself, mainly cuz we want to save money for our trip to the States this summer. And also, my fiance's family in Beijing just really they're not feeling up to hosting a big gathering this year. So, you know, fair enough, fair enough.

Uh most likely we'll just be kicking it at the homestead, dumplings and fish with the fam while we watch the CCTV Spring Festival Gala until midnight. Uh but uh hopefully next year we can be doing things in Beijing. Wouldn't that be cool?

Uh but you know, overall, winter break is just been us relaxing. The missus and I had a really busy semester, so we've just been vegging out. Uh we went snow skiing, that was fun. Uh we've had Beijing roast duck dinners and uh yeah, we've just really been enjoying ourselves.

Um by By way, the new Qin and Han History Museum up in Xiangyang is amazing. Uh I highly recommend it.

So, anyways, uh enough of the jibber-jabber and the oversharing. Let's get back to the story.

So, we're reaching the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968, and this is where the Cultural Revolution probably reaches its most radical zenith with all of the positive and negative things it entails. This is truly where we get to the agony and the ecstasy, the best of times and the worst of times.

We'll see how large swaths of China experiences the party apparatus essentially collapsing as local party branches split into rebel cadre factions and much of the country, I won't say most of the country, but much of the country becomes de facto ruled by either the PLA or various mass organizations with only the Central Committee and CCRG in Beijing and the provincial revolutionary committees that had been established by then really the only things holding the Communist Party of China as a, you know, Leninist vanguard party together. That's the only thing that is holding together.

Indeed, by the last week of October 1967, where we last left off, the small, quote unquote, I'm quoting here, to quote MacFarquhar and Schoenhals in Mao's Last Revolution, the quote "small party nuclei within the revolutionary committees made up of rebel cadre factions were the only way that the provincial party committees had any hope of being reconstituted before the next party congress that Mao wanted to see so badly by 1969."

Yes, indeed my friends, it seemed that the all around civil war had collapsed not so much into a civil war as so much as a cauldron of complete chaos with no clear sides to speak of and only the most bare bones of a communist party to lead the proletariat in the battle against capitalist restoration.

Now, one thing that did unite everyone in China though, let me tell you, was the day of November 7th, 1967.

Now, November 7th, 1967 in the Gregorian calendar was the 50th anniversary of the Great Soviet October Socialist Revolution led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

The half-century of the revolution that had established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the first Communist Party led socialist nation in human history, was obviously a deeply revered holiday in socialist China and one that had to be celebrated with the utmost pomp, circumstance, and military revolutionary fervor.

And of course, in a way that they could stick their middle finger up to those Soviet revisionists.

After all, um the Soviets had just put the finishing touches on de-Stalinization that recently. Now, de-Stalinization started in 1956 with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with the denunciation of the personality cult and they started tearing down the statues of Stalin. They took Stalin out of the Lenin and Stalin Mausoleum and buried him in the Kremlin wall.

Um but in 1965, the Soviet economic reforms of 1965, aka the Kosygin reforms, really cemented de-Stalinization.

And what the Soviet economic reforms of '65 did is they made accumulation of profit rather than human need the driving force of the Soviet economy and it instituted two things, {quote} "one-man management in state-owned enterprises and {quote} economic independence of enterprises"

which well, this didn't privatize state-owned enterprises like you would see with perestroika in the 1980s or the reform and opening up in China in the late '70s and early '80s, what this meant was is that the managers of Soviet workplaces were now personally able to determine the detailed range and variety of products using their own personal funds to invest in production and accumulate capital from the surplus value of Soviet workers for their enterprise with only the most minute amount of consulting of the State Planning Commission.

All of these reforms only gave the Communist Party of China further proof that the USSR had betrayed the principles of Lenin's revolution and had become a capitalist state and in a socialist imperialist state. I'm sorry, not even socialist imperialist, social imperialist. Socialist in name, imperialist in deeds. And now it was time for the People's Republic of China to take up the mantles of the defenders of Lenin and the October Revolution.

So, on November 6, 1967, beneath portraits of Lenin and Stalin, Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and other CCRG comrades chaired a rally of 10,000 people in the Great Hall of the People to celebrate the October Revolution.

Lin Biao gave the keynote speech calling for the {quote} revisionist renegade clique led by Leonid Brezhnev to be toppled by the Soviet proletariat. Well, Zhou Enlai denounced Khrushchev's doctrine of peaceful coexistence with with the USA and the European bloc.

The rally ended with the singing of the Internationale as the audience waved copies of the Little Red Book and held up large portraits of Lenin and Stalin chanting, "Long live Lenin! Long live Stalin! Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the Great October Socialist Revolution! Long live the Communist PARTY OF CHINA! DOWN with the Soviet Union!"

A large anti-Soviet revisionist demonstration of several hundred thousand followed in Tiananmen Square the next day. On that same day, People's Daily Newspaper and Red Flag Theoretical Journal published a series of joint editorials and polemics saying the international proletariat and the communist parties of the world were being betrayed by Soviet pursuit of peaceful coexistence with the USA.

The editorials and polemics were printed into pamphlets and distributed widely among the Chinese masses by the party, army, and Red Guard propagandists who helped stoke anti-Soviet sentiment among the Chinese people and strengthen belief among the population that only Mao Zedong thought could carry forward Marxism-Leninism, and that the victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China was the only way to defend the victories of the October Revolution, and furthermore, to spread more October Revolutions across countries around the world until global communism.

To say that these anti-Soviet pro-October celebrations across the first half of November were a massive propaganda victory for Mao and the Party Center would truly be an understatement. Sadly, however, the Party Center's attempt to rally the myriad warring rebel factions together in a united front against Soviet social imperialism was essentially a non-starter after about, say, a week.

The Beijing Red Guard movement was still, well, the Beijing Red Guard movement with all the brutal fighting that it all involved.

By fall 1967, every Party Committee in Beijing's university campuses had effectively ceased to exist. The Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Committee attempted to use the months of November and December to hammer out a peace deal between the various Beijing University Red Guard groups with the help of Nie Yuanzi, and to reconstitute the party within Beijing's higher institutions, but to no avail.

It seemed nothing could keep the BeiDa Red Guards from splitting more and more into various factions despite many of their leaders being elected to the city's revolutionary committee.

One thing I failed to mention in the past few episodes just because we've been covering so much other important things is that at Tsinghua University the Red Guard movement had split yet again earlier that year with the April 14th Red Guards also known as the 414 faction. I'll refer to it as the 414 faction for the rest of the episode walking away from Kuai Dafu's Tsinghua Jinggangshan Red Guards ostensibly because of Kuai's commandism and ultra-leftism becoming too much for them.

Struggle sessions and fist fights between the two factions had dominated through spring and fall of 1966 sorry 1967 on the campus, but things were wrapping up even worse as winter was rolling in.

On November 16th, a Tsinghua Jinggangshan Red Guard detachment led by Kuai captured the former university party secretary after an attempt by the 414 faction to rehabilitate him. And the Jinggangshan Red Guards put him through a cruel and humiliating struggle session. However, the 414 faction crashed through the gates of the meeting area where the struggle session was taking place.

And what started as a line struggle argument quickly descended into a violent brawl with many injured. In retaliation, on December 4th Tsinghua Jinggangshan Red Guards put purged cadre Lu Yingzhong through a struggle session after attempts by the 414 faction to rehabilitate him.

The next day, a group of Beijing Red Guard representatives from around the city reported to the CCRG that Red Guard factions in almost every college of Beijing were fortifying their campuses, digging tunnel networks, and stockpiling arms despite the prohibitions of such after the end of the Arm the Left campaign. Meanwhile, at Tsinghua, Lu Yingzhong was put through a second day of struggle by Kuai Dafu's forces that nearly killed him and some of his cohorts.

At one point, some of Liu's supporters crashed the meeting and yet another bloody fight broke out.

On December 4th, Tsinghua's 414 faction demanded an apology from the Jinggangshan group for the violence which badly hurt several students 2 days before. All of their advances were rebuffed. On the 8th, 287 rebel cadres and rebel professors wrote to Kuai Da-fu's Jinggangshan group demanding that they release Liu Yingzhong from captivity and give him a chance to self-criticize and undergo rectification re-education. But, once again, their requests fell on deaf ears.

A week later, at the Renmin University of China, a large group of Red Guards and rebel teachers that had been aligned with the Earth faction group defected en masse to the Heaven faction aligned group called the Three Banners Red Guards, causing a massive schism at Renmin University that brought universe the negotiations for a university grand alliance and eventual revolutionary committee to a complete standstill.

Meanwhile, back at Tsinghua, Kuai Dafu ordered the abduction of Chen Chusan, the leader of the 414 faction. Upon arresting him, the Jinggangshan Red Guards beat Chen and burnt him with cigarettes until he fell unconscious.

Afterwards, the Jinggangshan Red Guards handed over the {quote} counter-revolutionary Chen to the Ministry of Public Security precinct, which the local PSB precinct there was staffed by cops who were loyal to Jinggangshan because Xie Fuzhi and Kuai Dafu, they were buddies. So, you can only imagine what happened next to poor Chen Chusan.

Later that night, Kuai Dafu sent his troops to arrest 20 cadres supporting the 414 faction at their homes and published the names of 41 more class enemies on dazibao around the campus. The next day, on December 21st, the 414 faction held a mass protest march outside the Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Committee, chanting slogans against Kuai Dafu and his ally Minister of Public Security Xie Fuzhi.

The protesters stormed the Beijing Revolutionary Committee's offices and began a sit-in pledging not to leave until Chen Chusan was freed from police custody.

The sit-in lasted 7 days while Chen was continually tortured, and eventually Xie Fuzhi accepted their demand to release their faction leader Chen without charges.

That night, Xie Fuzhi and Qi Benyu spent the whole evening in a meeting with various Qinghua Jinggangshan representatives explaining their decision to pardon and release Chen, although Kuai and his comrades found their rationale insufficient. And the beef between the Qinghua Jinggangshan and Qinghua Beef 414 factions would only continue to grow sharper and bloodier as both sides began to arm themselves with military-grade weaponry.

On January 4th, a top Beijing PLA Garrison officer was dispatched to Qinghua University to mediate between the two factions who had started fighting with weapons. The 414 faction argued that Qinghua must be put under PLA martial law as a prerequisite to interfactual cooperation. Kuai Dafu, however, vehemently disagreed and once again, negotiations broke down.

Finally, as January of 1968 was brought to a close, bruised egos, black eyes, and broken bones on Beijing's campuses finally gave way to dead bodies and rivers of blood on Beijing's campuses. On the final night of the month, January 31st, Kuaida Fu had at least 20 counter-revolutionaries from various other Red Guard factions both on Qinghua campuses and at other colleges around Beijing arrested by his troops. The prisoners were imprisoned in the university's classrooms and brutally beaten until they confessed to being counter-revolutionaries.

Out of the 20 prisoners, one ended up dying from his injuries and it ended up sparking a full-scale war on the campuses of Beijing. The armed battles between the various leftist and ultra-leftist factions on Qinghua University, Beijing University, and other college campuses in the city across the first few months of 1968 ended up with dozens dead and hundreds wounded.

One young woman wrote, "Watching a funeral procession for her fallen comrades who had died at the hands of their fellow communists."

At the head of the procession were the tens of dead, their comrades holding their blood-soaked bodies aloft for everyone to see. The wounded followed, aided too by their fellow rebels, and young female revolutionaries were honored to carry the set occasional severed bit of a body, an arm, or leg, or a hand as proof of the viciousness of the fight.

Behind the wounded were the defeated troops, defiant and high-spirited even in retreat.

A few carried guns, but their primary weapons of war at that point were the razor-sharp sickles originally destined for Castro's sugar fields. They marched in perfect formation, alternately chanting time and yelling slogans of defiance and revenge. They were proud to have risked their lives and would be willing to risk death again. They believed that they were going to die for Chairman Mao.

Sadly, my friends, as spring and summer of 1968 rolled around, things are only going to get worse and the Red Guard movement nationwide will have entirely forgotten its original goals of serve the people and bombard the headquarters. But, what about outside Beijing?

Well, let's take a look at here, Shaanxi province, where I'm living. Here in Shaanxi province, things were also getting pretty rough.

While Xi'an had become generally an oasis of peace of and calm, of economic and social progress, and had a strongly left-wing PLA garrison helping the rebel factions there unite to construct a municipal revolutionary committee by the end of the summer, the rest of the province had essentially collapsed into pure chaos.

Military districts and county party committees alike ceased to have any authority as PLA and people's militia troops and party cadres split into their own rebel cadre and rebel soldier militias and aligned with left, right, and ultra-left Red Guard factions.

In Yulin, which is in northern Shaanxi and is famous for being part of the Yan'an a base area during the Chinese Civil War and World War II, the quote two reds red guard faction, the East is red red guard faction, and the local PLA rebel garrison duked it out leaving dozens dead.

While in the city of Ankang, several red guards factions incursions into the countryside to fight against various peasant rebel factions left several hundred dead each month between November of '67 and July of '68.

Yan'an itself was just as bad. The ultra-left Red Alliance Red Guards and the conservative Allied Headquarters Red Guards kept fighting and it resulted in about 150 to 300 deaths each month.

Extrajudicial mass killings, vigilante executions, and fatal struggle sessions without the consultation of the local revolutionary committees or peoples courts became increasingly common in the Shaanxi countryside, particularly in the wake of the panic against the May 16th conspiracy and the beginning of the cleansing of the class ranks campaign.

It was really a sad state of affairs in our province. Despite being seen as a symbol of revolution and rebellion due to the legacy of the Shaanxi Soviet in the 1930s and 1940s, the entire countryside of Shaanxi had broken down into a massive guerrilla war between dozens, maybe even hundreds of factions.

It was becoming clear that the masses of our province were becoming understandably, very understandably, frightened, demoralized, and exhausted. And in my personal experience, uh old folks from the Shaanxi countryside or uh other cities outside of Xi'an like Hanzhong, Xianyang, they have a somewhat more negative view over all of the Cultural Revolution to this very day compared to say folks who lived in Xi'an at the time.

By the beginning of spring '68, the people of rural Shaanxi were begging the PLA to restore order. And honestly, I don't fully blame them. Can you?

Meanwhile, in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, the Shengwulian rebel group were continuing to cause a ruckus as their radical rhetoric of pushing the Cultural Revolution to an even more extreme trajectory kept cranking up.

Remember I told you guys about in episode 15, the Hunan Provincial Proletarian Revolutionary Great Alliance Committee, aka the Shengwulian.

Well, if you recall, their attempt at becoming a new organ of mass rule within the Hunan province as an alternative to the revolutionary committee model infuriated Zhou Enlai.

And Zhou told them to immediately quote, "Scrap this ultra-leftist ideal." Unquote. And told them that their ideas bordered on anarchism rather than Marxism.

The Shengwulian leadership, however, said, "Nah, fam. We going to keep doing this."

Sheng Wu Lian took the slogan of quote, "Carry out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to the end." very seriously, even if that meant going beyond what the Communist Party wanted at that particular time.

On January 6th, 1968, a college student named Yang Xiguang, who was a prominent figure within Shengwulian, published a pamphlet that would send shockwaves through the Red Guard movement across China and through the halls of power in Beijing.

The pamphlet entitled Whither China asked a series of very uncomfortable questions and proposed some very uncomfortable solutions to those questions.

While still strongly identifying as a Marxist-Leninist and as a student of Mao Zedong Thought, and though Yang praised Chairman Mao as the greatest revolutionary of all time and as the great leader of the Cultural Revolution, Yang felt Chairman Mao had lost sight of the goal of the Cultural Revolution.

Yang said Mao had short-sightedly rolled back many of the gains of the January storm of 1967 and was underestimating the size of the bourgeois headquarters within the party.

Yang, by his own estimate, said that 90% of party cadres were capitalist roaders, and not just the quote small handful that Mao had originally spoken of in 1966.

Yang didn't mince words as to who was the problem, either. Not only were Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping the problem, but Zhou Enlai was also an arch-revisionist who was leading China onto the capitalist road.

Yang felt that the Communist Party was now a thoroughly rotten institution and it was time for the Chinese proletariat to discard it and to go beyond it if socialism was to be preserved in China and the cause of world communism to be realized.

Yang said that the dismantlement of the Shanghai Commune, the instituting of the revolutionary committees, and the spring 1967 institution of PLA rule in many parts of the country were a mix of a series of errors on Mao's part and a series of betrayals on Zhou Enlai's part.

Yang and Shengwulian's program was clear. The rebel mass movement across China must rise up to overthrow the revolutionary committees, reinstitute the Shanghai commune model all across China, dismantle the People's Liberation Army as a standing army, and replace the CPC and national government with a people's commune of China defended by a decentralized people's militia of China akin to that of the Paris Commune of 1871.

Needless to say, the Central Cultural Revolution Group, the People's Liberation Army, the Central Military Commission, and the leaderships of the other Hunan rebel groups were utterly infuriated. And there was a flurry of condemnations in the national press and in local Hunanese Red Guard newsletters venomously condemning Shengwulian as anarchists and Trotskyists.

Yang Xiguang went into hiding while his mother Chen Su, who was a notable revolutionary veteran as well as a prominent rebel leader herself, was captured by a rival group of Red Guards who tortured her for a week straight. On January 23rd, she was released by her captors without charge, but in her trauma and humiliation, she committed suicide by hanging.

Scholar Wu Yiching writes, and as you guys know, Wu Yiching he's very sympathetic to Shengwulian, especially if you've read his journal article about it called The Great Discontent, and of course his wonderful text The Cultural Revolution in the Margins.

Anyways, Wu writes, quote, "At a conference in Beijing on January 24th, 1968, top Communist Party leaders Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, Yao Wenyuan, Chen Boda, and Zhou Enlai unanimously accused the Sheng Wulian of every form of heinous political crime. In particular, the national leaders condemned Shengwulian activists' idea that a newborn capitalist privileged stratum had emerged in China and urged that the organization be immediately dismantled."

"While there was no indication that Mao personally authorized the Sheng Wu Lian's suppression, he was clearly well aware of the developments in Hunan. At the historic meeting with Beijing Red Guard leaders in July of 1968, which effectively marked the end of the Red Guard movement, Mao just made a disparaging reference of the Sheng Wu Lian style hotchpotch." End quote.

On January 26, 1968, the Provisional Preparatory Group of the Hunan Provincial Revolutionary Committee, which was pretty much the coalition of all the rebel groups that were not Shengwulian, held a mass meeting in Changsha to denounce the Shengwulian.

And on February 19th, 200,000 PLA soldiers and Red Guards from opposing factions in Changsha gathered and marched on Shengwulian's headquarters, where the leadership was rounded up and arrested, forcefully dissolving one of the most theoretically interesting and thought-provoking mass rebel organizations of the entire Cultural Revolution.

And again, it's like I said in episode 15, I and there are going to be some of my fellow Maoists who are going to be really angry at me about this, but I actually have some sympathetic feelings for Shengwulian and what they were trying to do.

Allow me to quote myself from that episode, episode 15. Quote, "I don't think the questions that Shengwulian were was asking were necessarily wrong. The question of, you know, is Chairman Mao going far enough to thoroughly uproot the red bourgeoisie from the party and keeping us on the road to communism? That was a valid question and a question, in my opinion, is still unanswered by Marxists today.

The problem I have with Shengwulian is they ultimately advocated for an anarchist position that said that the party itself was the entire problem. They were basically going for what, you know, today post-Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou was going for. Who, you know, Badiou, he's I respect him. He's written some good books, but ultimately I disagree with his basic premises.

On the one hand, I agree that there were far more capitalist roaders in the party than Mao originally thought. But on the other hand, I'm a firm believer that every revolution, be it a bourgeois democratic revolution, a socialist people's war, or a cultural revolution after a socialist people's war, still needs a class vanguard leading it.

And at that point in China, the Communist Party of China, I still feel it had a sizable amount of revolutionary still leading it and that it made it a salvageable project. I think Sheng Wu Lian would have ended up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and ended up causing far more bloodshed than necessary.

Um, so in the end, I think Mao was correct in allowing the party form to continue leading the Cultural Revolution and allowing himself to continue having the final say. It's not an easy choice, but it's the best the revolution could do at that point, considering the material conditions.

So, anyways, that's how I feel about Shengwulian. But, um you know, you guys, uh let me know in the comments, uh on my Twitter page, and uh let me know what you guys think more in our Discord server.

So, meanwhile, the Party Center had even more ideas on how to further curtail the ultra-left. With Shengwulian knocked down in Hunan, it was time to ferret out similarly-minded people within the halls of power in Zhongnanhai.

You see, remember how in episode 15 we talked about the Wang Guan Qi clique and how Wang Li and Guan Feng got toppled and put under house arrest, while Qi Benyu wrote a criticism denouncing Wang and Guan? And uh well, now it was Qi's turn to get knocked down.

Obviously, his self-criticism and denouncing of Wang and Guan were not enough. Qi had refused to cease in his rabble-rousing, and his attacks on Zhou and the centrists around him continued to stoke the flames. And he was also still pretty supportive of the more ultra-left, anarchistic Red Guard factions who wanted to ramp up the sectarian warfare.

In response, on January 13th, 1968, Mao didn't say arrest Qi, but he gave the go-ahead to have Zhou Enlai. He basically said to Zhou Enlai, quote, "Do whatever is necessary to get Chi under control." That day, Zhou Enlai convened a special meeting of the Central Cultural Revolution Group and informed them of Mao's decision about Qi-Benyu and with that Zhou telephoned for Qi to come to the meeting.

Qi Benyu entered the meeting expecting business to be as usual when suddenly Xie Fujie stood up and with a group of police officers flanking him rushed toward Qi and informed him, "You're under arrest." Qi Benyu was promptly handcuffed and led to a black unmarked police car with Qi screaming repeatedly, "WHAT A JOKE! WHAT A JOKE! YOU'RE ALL A BUNCH OF CLOWNS."

Qi Benyu demanded to know what he was being charged with but Xie and the police officers escorted him to the unmarked car refused to answer his questions. Before they shut the door Qi was heard yelling towards Xie and Zhou, "Say hello to Jiang Qing for me," which made it obvious that Qi suspected Jiang Qing was behind his arrest alongside Xie and Zhou.

Two weeks later Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Chi Pen-yu who had served as Mao's emissaries at the Congress of Beijing Red Guard organizations only a year ago were pulled out of house arrest and without trial were transferred to the Qincheng Prison, the most notorious and maximum security prison in Beijing reserved for the worst political prisoners where they would remain locked up for the remainder of the Cultural Revolution and during the reform and opening up. Woo boy.

Pretty crazy, huh? Well, yet another thing that also gets really really crazy during this period. Yes, this episode is not done.

Mainly around January 1968 is the personality cult around Mao gets kicked into even higher gear.

Sure, starting in summer of '66, there were pictures of Mao plastered on almost every surface of every building in the country. People waved little red books at rallies, studied Mao's works far more than any other Marxist theorist, and called Chairman Mao the morning sun and the reddest red sun in the sky.

But in the end of '67 and the beginning of '68, this is where things tend to take an oddly excessive turn.

Marshall Lin Biao, as Chairman Mao's second-in-command, began launching a series of loyalty campaigns across 1968 and into 1969 leading up to the Ninth Congress. With tacit approval by Mao, Mao hoped that the personality cult could be used as a pole around which they could rally as many factions and tendencies as possible, and put one the road to a nationwide grand alliance of revolutionaries, as well as to reconstitute the party on the provincial and municipal levels.

During that time, reverence for Mao verged on how honestly I feel got a little bizarre and frankly metaphysical. In some workplaces, people would begin their workdays by bowing before a picture of the chairman and ending the workday by bowing before a picture of him, during which people would thank him for his guidance in their work.

People were encouraged to memorize the Little Red Book in its entirety, although many people commented that it didn't come with people achieving a deeper understanding of Mao's works. Indeed, Lin was known for saying, quote, "Memorize Chairman Mao's works and follow Chairman Mao's orders, even if you don't understand them." A very un-Marxist methodology, if I do say so myself.

People in places like Tibet and Inner Mongolia began to ascribe magical powers and healing properties to Mao badges and portraits of Chairman Mao and believed that they would ward off evil spirits and ghosts and could cure disease.

All across the country, giant statues of Chairman Mao appeared in town squares and on university campuses, which actually irked Mao because he thought it was a waste of resources. My personal favorite thing to collect from the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao badges, exploded in production with hundreds of millions of badges being made in the first half of '68 alone in massive factories that would churn out badges en masse at all hours of the day and night. Most people wore Mao badges daily by, you know, 1960 by the end of 1966.

But in 1968, it became customary for people to own several dozen badges and badges were also used as gifts to comrades or prizes in production competitions. Dozens of new songs about Mao were written and people would often sing these songs performing painstaking choreographed loyalty dances and Mao Zedong thought gymnastics that showed loyalty and devotion to Chairman Mao as the morning sun of the revolution and who was making the entire East become red.

As scholar Daniel Lee says in the compilation Mao's Little Red Book, A Global History edited by Alexander C. Cook, across 1966 and 1967, the "employment of Mao's quotations had resulted in anarchic quotation wars and now order was restored with ritual demonstrations of loyalty and faith in the chairman. As we will see, however, it's going to take a lot more than quotation recitation competitions and choreographed loyalty dances to restore order.

Uh, personally, I don't know. As much as I love collecting antiques and memorabilia from this area, I think the Mao cult was rather excessive and you know, uh, the problem with personality cults is this, my friends. I think they're a double-edged sword. They can be used to put a revolutionary leader's communist line in command of a revolution, but at the same time, they risk stunting ideological and intellectual creativity.

And they can also be hijacked for nefarious purposes, as we will see with Lin Biao and Chen Boda when they deal with the Mao cult. I myself, I was a member of the Youth League of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA when I was in high school and uh, the first half of college.

And I always found the personality cult around our chairman, Bob Avakian, to be stifling of internal development of cadres and at the very least off-putting to the broader masses. In short, well, I'm okay with the masses showing love and support for revolutionary leaders, be it Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Gonzalo, uh, Sison, uh, Mazumdar. I completely understand that.

But, you know, I'm okay with the masses showing love and support for revolutionary leaders, uh, but I feel like full-blown state-sponsored personality cults are a temporary solution to much larger problems. And as we see in 1950s USSR and late 1970s China, they ultimately fail in their goals to push back against the leaders' opponents.

But again, I might be wrong. What do you guys think? Sound off in the comments and on the Discord chat.

Still, personality cult or not, the masses were still building new revolutionary forms of power and good things were still happening in late '67 and early '68.

Revolutionary committees were established in Inner Mongolia on November 1st, '67, Tianjin on December 6th, '67, and then in Jiangxi, Gansu, and Hunan across the first two weeks of January of '68.

The revolutionary committees were also spreading on a local level, too. Radio Harbin reported in the last week of December of '67 that 94% of Heilongjiang cities and counties were now being run by their own local revolutionary committees. And in provinces that had set up provincial revolutionary committees, a plurality of workplaces and communal farms were now being run by revolutionary committees.

While unfortunately, it seemed that the majority of provincial and municipal revolutionary committees continued to be chaired or de facto dominated by the People's Liberation Army, the revolutionary committees did have the positive impact of keeping the remnants of the local party apparatus together, if only via the rebel cadre sections of the three-in-one bodies within the revolutionary committees.

Indeed, in a 1969 speech held shortly after the ninth congress of the Communist Party, Mao said that the revolutionary committees had been crucial in reconstituting the party on both an organizational level and on a theoretical level. So, like all things in the Cultural Revolution, it's dialectical. Lots of good things, lots of bad things coming out of things like this.

What is interesting to me is how some of the revolutionary committees were formed on local levels, particularly at workplace levels.

Uh during this time, some factional fighting within factories took on the form of, for the lack of a better term, I guess, miniature power seizures, a year after the January storm, no less, that ended in the toppling of rightist management bodies.

Whenever these in-plant uprisings took place, newly constituted and directly elected revolutionary committees composed of workers from rebel factions, non-party technicians, and rebel party cadres took over the directing of the daily activities of the factories. This new form of factory management was promoted as a model and spread nationwide during fall of '67 and early '68.

Direct grassroots democracy within the workplace, rural communes, and villages became more and more developed across winter of 1968 in ways that, in my opinion, hearken back to the early workplace and village soviets of the first few years of the Russian Revolution, albeit obviously at a very local level.

It was also on this level that we see on like in terms of workplaces, villages, collective farms, we see a lot less arbitrary PLA domination of the revolutionary committees. Uh and you know, this actually finally answered my question as to how revolutionary committees in workplaces and collective farms worked in which there were no PLA or People's Militias armories or garrisons attached to that particular work unit. So, yeah, uh the research for this episode was actually very eye-opening for me.

In even more positive developments in society happening at the time, in the last months of 1967 and early months of '68, physicians and nurses from Shanghai took advantage of their new training and the relative calm within their city to volunteer to become barefoot doctors in the countryside.

Recruiting many of the city's Red Guards to come along with them, they held up the banner of ‘serve the people’ as Chairman Mao instructed them and helped rapidly build up health care infrastructure across the Chinese countryside, even in the midst of the factional fighting.

Scholars like Gao Mobo and Maurice Meisner talk about how these barefoot doctors both aided in building new clinics and hospitals as well as training local workers and peasants into becoming certified medics for when traveling to a hospital or waiting for an ambulance to arrive might take too long.

In exchange, the Shanghai-based barefoot doctors, both the trained physicians and their Red Guard assistants, worked alongside the masses in the countryside to help with agricultural output and to teach them to plant new crops that could be used to manufacture both traditional Chinese medicine and synthesized into chemicals to create Western pharmaceuticals.

Once again, as I've shown you guys before, even at the Cultural Revolution's darkest hours, even when the bloodshed is at its worst, the Chinese masses have found ways to take the revolution into their own hands, develop their society in terms of ways of expanding democratic institutions, and overall, the social development of their quality of life.

Meanwhile, the effects of the Cultural Revolution were continuing to spill outwards across the world. While I do want to keep the bulk of these consequences to our later two-part episode near the end of our series about the transnational consequences of the Cultural Revolution, um and you know, although really

the explosion of Mao-inspired anti-revisionist communist parties like Black Panther Party and Progressive Labor Party in the US, the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist, the Communist Party of Australia Marxist-Leninist, other anti-revisionist political split-off groups I mentioned in a couple of episodes back, that had already begun to be a thing, but it really would be a few more months into 1968 that we would see what scholars today call "global Maoism" really take off, especially after May of 1968.

So, we'll get into that in a few more episodes and then like I said near the end of the series.

Still, by December of '67, Asia had become a powder keg of Mao Zedong Thought-inspired struggle or at least pro-Chinese thought. Be it in East Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia, the East was becoming redder and redder and it seemed that the forces of revolution and national liberation were on the strategic offensive across the continent.

In Indonesia, where the Communist Party of Indonesia had been banned after a brutal military coup which ended in the slaughter of millions of communist cadres and their supporters, Chinese diplomats at the embassy in Jakarta stood militantly with their imprisoned and murdered Indonesian comrades, using the Chinese embassy as a base area of global proletarian revolution and would use the walls and gates of their embassy to post up posters and banners denouncing Suharto's new fascist military regime and would often shout anti-fascist slogans via megaphone from the windows of the embassy building.

Soon scuffles between Chinese embassy staff and Indonesian government thugs broke out on the sidewalks in front of the embassy resulting in several injuries.

On November 11th, 1967, the Chinese embassy closed their doors, severed all diplomatic ties with Indonesia, and airlifted all diplomatic staff back to Beijing.

The embassy staff were greeted in Beijing with a rally at the airport lauding them as red diplomatic fighters who had brought the great proletarian cultural revolution to the doorstep of the Indonesian fascist regime.

One of the most iconic scenes from that rally was when the heavily injured Chinese chargé d'affaires was brought off the plane in a stretcher, defiantly holding a portrait of Chairman Mao in his left hand, and raising his right fist in a proletarian internationalist salute.

The message was clear. No matter where the Chinese people went, they would be red fighters against fascism and would be partisan of Chairman Mao's cultural revolution.

In the Middle East, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, aka South Yemen, was founded on November 30th, 1967 after a long communist and socialist-led national liberation struggle against the British.

The Chinese were able to quickly make overtures to the Yemenis who they saw as a possible second Arab ally alongside the Palestinians. In a special ceremony in Cairo, while South Yemen had not yet officially declared itself a socialist republic led by a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party, the Yemenis were already putting into place policies that were very similar to Mao's New Democratic Revolution in the 1950s and were making overtures to not just China, but the USSR, East Germany, Albania, North Korea, North Vietnam, Romania, and other left-wing ostensibly anti-imperialist states.

The Chinese made sure that plenty of Arabic language versions of the Little Red Book made its ways to the shores of Yemen for the new leadership to study alongside other literature extolling the virtues of socialist industrial development under the Cultural Revolution, hoping that maybe, just maybe, Yemen could become yet another base area in the global class struggle against Western bloc capitalism and Eastern Bloc revisionism.

In Vietnam, some 170,000 Chinese People's Liberation Army soldiers volunteered to fight against the South Vietnamese alongside their Vietnamese comrades. Yes, a lot of Chinese soldiers fought in the Vietnam War.

Um there's a new book out. It came out a couple of years ago. Oh my gosh, I have a copy. I still haven't gotten around to reading it. I don't remember the author's name, but it's called The Dragon in the Jungle and it's about PLA soldiers who volunteered alongside the People's Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Um so, yeah, check it out. The Dragon in the Jungle. But, you know, these guys, they firmly believed the fight to defeat revisionism at home included spreading socialist revolution across Asia.

Internationalism was part of the deal.

Cambodia, Burma, Malaysia, and Thailand also saw a massive resurgence of their ongoing communist people's wars with the Chinese government raising the amount of material and financial aid to these respective communist parties across late '67 and 1968 as well as sending PLA troops to act as military advisers.

And to teach them the doctrines of new democratic revolution, protracted people's war, and cultural revolution via local translations of Chairman Mao's works.

Even as things seem to be unraveling and falling into chaos in mainland China, it seemed that the global front of the cultural revolution was surging along more than victoriously than ever and

the rebellious essence of the cultural revolution was acting as fuel for ever more victorious people's wars, national liberation struggles, and even in the West many workers and students uprisings were becoming more and more influenced by China's cultural revolution.

The East it seemed was only growing redder and redder by the day even if China's mainland was experiencing grimmer and more dire instability as the weeks of 1968 went by.

All right, so we're coming up to the end, my friends.

So but before we part, let's completely switch gears here because there's something that's just been eating at me lately these past three episodes. And I want to use this as a conversation starter. Okay, homies. Let's just keep it real.

In summer of '66 Chairman Mao was a hair's breadth away from leading a split from the rest of the CPC, reconstituting the Chinese Red Army, reascending Jinggangshan in Jiangxi, and relaunching a protracted people's war to overthrow the capitalist roaders in the party and the PLA.

On New Year's Eve of December 31st, 1966, he toasted to the idea of an all-around civil war between the left wing of the CPC and rebel mass movements on one side and the right wing of the CPC and the officer corps of the PLA on the other side.

But now we're here 1 year later. You know, December of '67, January of '68, and he's talking he's gradually depending more and more on the PLA to restore order. He's talking about the car overturning too fast. He's demanding an end to the 'arm the left' campaign in September of '67, and going back yet again to the slogan of "the vast majority of cadres and soldiers are good."

But this time in the story, it's almost like Mao can't decide whether guerrilla armed struggle by the masses is a good thing or if it's going too far. And he can't decide whether the fracturing of the party is a good thing or whether it's a bad thing.

What is Mao cooking at this point? What is he thinking? I don't know. What do you guys think?

I'm thinking about launching a discussion specifically about this very question on both my Twitter account and in my Discord server because I think this is a very uncomfortable question that we historians, especially Maoist historians, need to face head-on. What was Mao's endgame in January of 1968?

I don't know, but if we want to sum up what Mao did correctly and what Mao did incorrectly and for us to do better in future socialist societies, this right here is definitely something we need to wrangle with. Oh boy. Woo.

All right, folks. Well, with that awkward and uncomfortable question for us to chew on, let's put a bookmark in the story and we'll pick things up next month. Um we're I'm not quite sure what's going on for February.

I sent out a bunch of emails to various scholars of Chinese history um asking if we could do a round table discussion of the state of GPCR studies within broader East Asian studies in academia and in popular discourse.

Uh so far the majority of scholars and professors have had to decline um because they're too busy or because it's Spring Festival. Others haven't replied. I've gotten a few maybes. Um it's not looking good, but hey, maybe I'll be able to cobble something together. If that doesn't work, if that doesn't work, I will do another thematic episode uh called "What was the Little Red Book" where I discuss the history and the meaning of the Little Red Book, the Quotations of Chairman Mao.

So, that's where we stand. Um much love to you all. Happy Spring Festival. You know, from the ancient city of Xi'an, I say, "Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, surmount every difficulty to win victory. And as always, love you all. Everyone be safe and take care.